Tweeting from the air

I hesitate to post yet another article defending Twitter from its detractors, but David Carr’s piece is very good and this anecdote is too amazing not to share:

The act of publishing on Twitter is so friction-free — a few keystrokes and hit send — that you can forget that others are out there listening. I was on a Virgin America cross-country flight, and used its wireless connection to tweet about the fact that the guy next to me seemed to be the leader of a cult involving Axe body spray. A half-hour later, a steward approached me and said he wondered if I would be more comfortable with a seat in the bulkhead. (He turned out to be a great guy, but I was doing a story involving another part of the company, so I had to decline the offer. @VirginAmerica, its corporate Twitter account, sent me a message afterward saying perhaps it should develop a screening process for Axe. It was creepy and comforting all at once.)

Think about that: In 30 minutes someone working for Virgin saw his Tweet, figured out which fight he was on, and got a message to an employee on the plane to locate him and offer him a new seat. Perhaps they wouldn’t have gone to the trouble for someone who’s profile doesn’t mention being a writer for the New York Times, but still, it’s like we’re living in the future!

The truest sentence in his article is this one:

There is always something more interesting on Twitter than whatever you happen to be working on.

Comments

Thanks for passing along the anecdote! Stories like that are *precisely* what I love about Twitter – there ARE people listening DO who care, regardless of their motive for caring. So many people are still afraid of the internet and essentially “living publicly.” If you lock yourself away in a room where no one can find you, guess what? No one can find you! There are trade-offs with social networking technology, but harping on the possible negatives is foolish when the potential positives outweigh it by so much.

Jacob Grier is a freelance writer, bartender, cocktail consultant, and magician in Portland, Oregon. He writes, eats, and drinks a lot. His articles have appeared in the print or online editions of The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, The Los Angeles Times, Reason, The Oregonian, and other publications. His book on beer cocktails, Cocktails on Tap, is forthcoming from Stewart, Tabori, and Chang in 2015. [Photo by David L. Reamer.]